Spring Has Sprung!

Spring is just a season, but for women, it’s a completely different experience depending on how old you are.

When you’re in school, spring is a very long season. It feels like it’s six months until mid-June when school ends. You still wear a jacket on your way to school in the morning and carry it home in the warm afternoon. As you walk to see the last fragments of the brown leaves of autumn on the sidewalks and the curbs, along with cigarettebutts which seem to survive anything. It’s perfect weather for dilly dallying and stopping somewhere to hang out with friends and discover who’s got a crush on whom. Boys were always clueless, but this is where girls begin the lifelong practice of over analyzing every single movement and gesture a male makes. We always think there’s hidden meaning in what they do. Only later do we realize that when they stare pensively off into space, they’re not thinking of how much they love us, they’re trying to remember when they last changed the oil.

In their 20s, women are thinking about dieting to get ready for summer swimsuits. There’s men or women to be chased, depending on which team you’re on, and befriending someone with access to a boat is a must before summer.

In their 30s, women still enjoy spring as an end to the winterdoldrums. We dread the end of school and the coming of summer when small, dirty people, called children, keep coming into the house and whining, “I’m bored…” Whenever my daughter said she was bored, it meant that she was going to decline any ideas I proposed and nag me until I was as miserable as she was. My only solution was to send her to someone else’s house, where she would be polite and sweet to somebody else’s parent.

In our 40s, spring means we get to buy some new furniture for the house, or maybe even score a whole new living room set. Because by now, we’re sick of the same beat up furniture and the kids have grown up enough not to set the sofa on fire, and we have learned that the husband’s LazyBoy recliner, regardless of its smell or condition, is not up for negotiation. New furniture will have to live around it or not be bought at all.

Now that I’m in my 50s, I try to make a point of stopping to enjoy spring and not rush from task to task. Time seems to pass so much faster now, and I caught myself looking at the tiny bright green leaves of a blooming maple tree and thinking, Thanksgiving will be here in no time.

I’ll have to give you a rain check on the 60s, 70s, and more. But for now, enjoy what you can when you can, and don’t watch Dr. Oz too much or you’ll worry yourself to death. Spring has sprung, let the good times roll!